Uganda lifts ban on CBS, staff celebrates with caution

Full, normal broadcasting of the Ugandan Central Broadcasting Service
(CBS)--owned by Uganda's powerful traditional Buganda
kingdom--resumed
Monday after nearly 14 months of silence.
While CBS staff welcomed their return to work, many recounted a tough year and
questioned the nature of the station's re-opening.

The government-influenced Broadcasting
Council summarily shuttered
CBS and three other stations in September 2009, as Council Chairman Godfrey
Mutabazi accused the broadcasters of inciting violence sparked by
the government's blocking of the Bagandan monarch from attending a youth
celebration north of the capital, Kampala. (The other stations were returned to
air quickly.) But when I pressed the chairman for examples of such incitement
last month, none were given. CBS News Editor Ndiwalana Kiwanuka told me, "They
took all the recordings to find any incriminating evidence of our broadcasts
but they didn't find anything."

It has been a hard year for the station staff under the suspension.
"Since CBS was closed, four members of its staff have died, some staff have not
been able to send their children to school, others have sold their property to
settle bank loans," CBS reporter Joseph Kafumbe told me. Kafumbe kept reporting
as best as he could on his blog, called KampalaToday,
but was forced to find other means for survival. Other CBS staff started a
private weekly in the Baganda language, Luganda, called Ggwanga(Nation), he said.

"They did not get much revenue from the venture but were at least
consoled by the fact that they continued to promote the Bugandas' cause,"
Kafumbe said. Although the Baganda are the largest ethnicity in the country,
many say they have remained politically marginalized. Other CBS staff linked up
with more journalists to start another Luganda paper, a biweekly called Eddoboozi,
while some scraped by recording advertisements and skits for radio and
television, he added.

Although Minister of Information, Communication, and Technology Aggrey
Awori lifted
the ban on the stations, ostensibly with no conditions, Kafumbe said, the
CBS staff are not convinced the station will be the same. For one thing, the
station's popular program "Mambo Bado," remains off the air; the program that had
local people calling in to voice their concerns about anything--from politics to
a pop singer's poor choice of attire. Further, while the station has re-opened,
it still does not have an operating license and must re-apply to the
Broadcasting Council.

"The radio was re-opened on political grounds, but its re-opening is
not legally binding," Mutabazi said in an October 25 report by the Ugandan Human Rights Network for Journalists.
Mutabazi said the meeting between
CBS management and the Broadcasting Council would convene soon to agree on the
license terms and conditions.

While President Yoweri Museveni toured the country with ruling party
members campaigning for the upcoming 2011 elections, citizens called on the
leader, who has ruled for 24 years, to re-open the station, the Daily Monitor reported. "Everywhere they went,
voters were mentioning CBS," a spokesman for the Buganda Kingdom, Charles Mayiga,
told Agence
France-Presse. It seems apparent, local journalists told me, that it was
Museveni and not the mandated Broadcasting Council who ordered
the opening and closure of the station. "Some in Buganda may be so
disillusioned that this makes no difference, but definitely government will do
better in the elections after re-opening CBS," Mayiga said in the AFP report.

Museveni needs Baganda electoral support. While Museveni may have taken
away CBS' critical fangs during the year, he can provide them baby teeth a few
months prior to polls. If local journalists are correct in their assumptions
that CBS' fate actually rests in the hands of the president, then the CBS saga
is a worrying reminder of how institutional autonomy can be destroyed along
with press freedom. With a president who can instantly shut a media house under
the guise of legitimate institutions, CBS may never again broadcast with its
former fiery, critical stance.

Tom Rhodes is CPJ's East Africa representative, based in Nairobi. Rhodes is a founder of southern Sudan’s first independent newspaper. Follow him on Twitter: @africamedia_CPJ